Saturday, July 03, 2010

The Oryan Project: from the garage to near space

Update: I created a subsite for this project as there's way too much information and images for a blog post, check out our website for this project at Astrohack.com.

Well, It's been quite a while since an update. We've been working on a number of things but probably most interesting was/is Project Oryan (Astrohack). The project was a self induced challenge to launch a platform into the stratosphere and take some amazing pictures of the little ball in which we live, all from commercially available parts and some garage space.

To date we've had many successful launches and have developed a stable repeatable launch process and platform. We've made it 100k feet several times and captured some amazing shots and data. We were surprised at all the attention it receives and have been covered by local and national media. We've also been fortunate to attend youth science activities to show our crafts and discuss the challenges of near space photography.

The pictures are from our second try. We lost communication with Oryan I on decent, but I'm happy to say Oryan II which was launched on July 1, 2010 was recovered successfully and worked flawlessly. Expect a better write up soon, but for now take a look at a couple of the pictures we got...